Author Archives: jabowen

Teaching the Pandemic

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Should you teach a stressful topic during a stressful time? While there are risks about focusing about what is on every student’s mind right now, there are good reasons to try. And yes, this is all works for your new online teaching.

First, virtually everyone is hungry for information about this quickly changing situation and the urgency and our natural curiosity are leading most people to click on anything coronavirus. Why not redirect this curiosity to a more productive purpose? Second, teaching is about motivation: only the person who does the work does the learning. Students are highly motivated to learn about this right now. Third, it is a complex interdisciplinary problem that involves ethics and judgement, precisely the sort of skill that employers say they want and we say we teach. Finally, it might even be a public service. With all of the misinformation available, helping students practice understanding sources and credibility could save lives and also demonstrate the value of this life skill.

I’d start with support and empathy—this is a great moment to demonstrate you care and build some community: both essential for good teaching and especially important as students are anxious and probably isolated. Then a pause to make sure students are ok diving into this topic, with acknowledgement some may have hesitations or other issues. I’d perhaps also say that staying healthy requires good information and the ability to find and analyze conflicting advice and sources.

There are connections with virtually every subject we offer on campus. There is certainly math, modeling, science, epidemiology and networking in abundance. Why would a small change in the mortality rate or the infectiousness matter? Why are airplane cabins safer than your gym right now? If some are finding it hard to understand the severity of precautions, that is an entry into the psychology of our bias against the future or how politics bias how we view evidence. Culture, history and sociology? Why do we shake hands anyway? Would we be healthier with different cultural greetings? Will people really self-quarantine? 

Music and art might seem less promising, but as Ted Gioia points out in his new book, Music: A Subversive History, people who survive a crisis, stop taking things for granted, and look at the familiar with fresh eyes. He argues that the Renaissance, Shakespeare and jazz all emerged in places and times that made them “sources of virality from both an artistic and epidemiological standpoint.” Discuss.

This is a particularly good moment for philosophy and ethics. With young people at relatively low risk for the most serious consequences, why were schools among the first to close? What are the obligations of individuals to society? How should people and governments (political science anyone?) make decisions to restrict the movements and lives of low-risk people for the benefit of high-risk people? 

With the stock market crash, empty shelves and questions about what stimulus might work in a situation where money isn’t the problem, business and economics classes should be equally interesting right now.

Teaching begins with engagement and there could hardly be a more engaging subject right now. 

Inclusive Teaching

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I have always been interested in inclusive teaching and with the changing demographics of higher education, I’m creating a workshop for college faculty, which I will add to the technology, course design and nudge workshops I have been doing for years. (This is also starting to form as the next book project after I finish the Nudge Learning book this summer; there is a LOT of overlap with my work on relationships, communal thinking and understanding how we can overcome the difficulties of change.) 

To me, the core principle of inclusive teaching is connected in every way to the design ideas I’ve advocated for years: Can we design better and more inclusive practices that help everyone but have a disproportionate positive effect on new, first-gen, non-trad or under-represented students.  (john a powell calls this “targeted universalism.” (2008, Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism Denver University Law Review, 86, p. 785-806) 

Transparency and rubrics, therefore, are already inclusive pedagogies. Knowing what is expected and getting clear instructions helps everyone, but it is even more valuable to first-generation and other students who are trying to unravel the code of our academic culture.

There is a lot of literature that looks specifically at racial and other equity in the classroom but not as much (that I have yet encountered) in terms of general pedagogy guidelines. I am most interested in reaching faculty who teach general subjects, especially gateway courses and especially STEM. 

I have started to draft a few core practices:

  1. Acknowledgement and Self-Awareness: understand, articulate and examine human biases and your cultural “common sense”—all of us think with an accent. Inclusive teaching is a mind-set shift form “weeding-out” to reaching everyone.
  2. Demonstrate Caring and Support: Acknowledge differences in student backgrounds and demonstrate your own failings often. Take the time to learn names, articulate difficulties (that was a hard test) and build relationships. 
  3. Transparency: Structure, clarity, scaffolding, checklists, and rubrics help everyone. Make visible your own assumptions, biases and expectations for teaching and learning. We all have them. More structure can be a huge equalizer (explaining the rules and why we are having discussion for example). 
  4. Content: can you diversify your content? If not, can you diversify perspectives? Ken Bain demonstrated long ago that all students benefit from hearing and understanding that our perspectives and disciplinary knowledge change. Can you include a non-Western critique or related version of this text or idea?
  5. Diversify Examples and Analogies: Do your test questions, essay examples and problem sets use a variety of names and analogies that will connect with a wide variety of students? (I have a further project to create a shared set of inclusive math problem sets with more diverse names and analogies. I don’t care when train A will catch up with train B.)
  6. Different Questions: The science you teach is determined, but what questions led to the discover of that science? Who benefited from that research and who sacrificed? Why were there not more women scientists or composers? Simply allowing the question creates agency for students.
  7. Highlight scholarly achievements of minorities: You can and should continue to discuss the contributions of White Europeans, but can you also find others to name and highlight
  8. Ask for early and specific feedback: Tell students you are trying to be more inclusive and asking for their help.
  9. Provide early feedback and assessment: Be the tennis net with immediate and non-judgemental feedback. Learning requires practice constant feedback.  
  10. Vary teaching strategies: You don’t need to abandon all lectures, but can you should consider who is being left out with each type of teaching. Can you try some different class exercises, strategies, discussion techniques? Technology, for example, can be a useful way to provide an additional different forum and format for discussion or allow for anonymous suggestions, responses, ideas or feedback
  11. Vary demonstrations of learning: You do not need to abandon all tests, but you do need to consider who is left out can you also create presentations, short-papers, creative videos and alternative assignments that might provide different opportunities to demonstrate learning?
  12. …lots more to do

Teaching is an equity enterprise: we should judge our success by the learning from the bottom half of the class. (The top half of the class are more likely to be successful even without us.) It is a tendency of humans (including teachers) to assume that our success is a result of our own behavior and our losses due to some other interference or what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, correspondence bias or overattribution.) 

Inclusive teaching is good teaching for everyone. And if it is really good teaching then it should always be inclusive. Quite a lot of what I think of as inclusive teaching (more structure, lower stakes for exams, demonstrate caring, building relationships) are the same things I think of as good for all teaching, but I think there is value in re-framing all of this as inclusive teaching now.

This project is at its very beginning, but I would welcome texts, suggestions, connections and recommendations to other people working in this space. 

Learning is S.W.E.E.T.

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My last WYPR commentary on learning

Discoveries in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, education, design thinking and behavioral economics have given us substantial new insights into how learning works. 

At its core, learning is what happens to the structure in your brain and it turns out that the five most important things anyone can do to improve learning are S.W.E.E.T.: sleep, water, exercise, eating, and time are the most important conditions for supporting your brain in learning.  

We have great experimental confirmation of all of these things. Moderate exercise, even 4 hours after studying improves retention. Being dehydrated reduces both cognitive and physical performance. And T is for time: teaching matters, but you learn more when you practice more.

The S for Sleep and it is critical because sleep is when your brain sorts memories and decides what to remember: if you get only 7 hours of sleep, your emotional reactions to yesterday’s class predominate. You remember that you felt stupid in math class.  But 90% of your REM sleep occurs in that 8th hour, so with an extra hour of sleep, your brain re-lives that math class and de-emotionalizes the memories: so you better remember the math part. 

These research findings can help us improve learning. Your brain lives in your body, so it only functions and learns well when it gets what it needs biologically. Emphasizing wellness and the SWEET part of learning is as essential as what happens in classrooms. 

There is a chapter on SWEET in the Nudge book, due out in 2022.

Thinking for Yourself

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My series on WYPR continues here https://www.wypr.org/post/bowen-three-rs-education with this discussion of my focus on a new 3Rs of process instead of just content.

Think for Yourself: what does this really mean?  The new convergence of behavioral economics, neuro-science, and cognitive psychologysuggest a new educational 3Rs of “Relationships, Resilience and Reflection” and new ways for this to be designed and delivered including “nudges.” If we want the new learning economy to be inclusive, we will need education to focus more on the potential we release and less on the content we input: graduates will need to be voracious self-regulating learners. 

The rapid pace of knowledge creating and a changing job market could mean that colleges have to adapt faster and update content more often. That is true, but even the most nimble college curriculum is likely to be four years out of date if it only focuses on content. We need to focus more on the process of learning to think for yourself. 

This is sometimes called, the meta-cognition of learning. Do you as the learning, understand how to help yourself change your mind and reflect on how new content must change your old habits and assumptions? Can you abandon your own preconceived ideas?

As a teacher, I most want to make myself obsolete. I want to help my students discover new content and process it for themselves, so that eventually, without me, they will be able to ask better questions, seek new information, understand how this will create discomfort, and generate new mental assumptions. So instead of telling students that this paper, experiment or musical piece needs more work, I ask them if they think their work is ready for public performance yet? Eventually that is the question they will need to ask and answer themselves.That is thinking for yourself.

From Professor to Cognitive Coach

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The next of my commentaries on education on WYPR

Learning is a bit like fitness. The person who does the work gets the benefit. 

So the best teacher is not necessarily the one who knows the most, in the same way that the best fitness coach is not the one who can DO the most push-ups. Watching someone else do push-ups, even intellectual push-ups, is not nearly as useful as doing push-ups yourself. 

While it is tempting to think that the best gym is the one with all the latest technology and the coach with the largest muscles, like knowledge, exercise equipment is only beneficial if you use it. You need to be motivated to get on and pedal faster. 

So a good fitness coach or teacher starts by asking: why are you here? Understanding what motivates you and what you already know (or fear) about a subject is essential. (If I don’t know you are afraid of water, my swim lessons will be much less effective.) 

A good fitness coach adds value because she understands YOU and can get YOU to do more push-ups. It is a design problem. Classes work the same way. If I can design structures and assignments that you find more motivating and engaging and you do more work, you will learn more. The role of the teacher as “professor” (with a focus on “professing” and conveying content) needs to be reimagined as more of a cognitive coach (with a focus on the process that will both inspire the student to do the work).

[This shift from more content to more process and how we can design better learning environments and schools is the subject of the new book I am working on this year:A New 3Rs: Using Behavioral Science to Prepare Students for a New Learning Economy due from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020.]

Expanding Comfort with Discomfort

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Here is the text of my latest public commentary on WYPR: https://www.wypr.org/post/bowen-expanding-comfort-discomfort

Some tolerance for ambiguity is essential for learning, change, and growth. When we encounter a new idea, technology or method, it feels strange at first. That is almost the definition of new: something foreign to what we already know. 

Goucher College requires all students to study abroad. And when students ask where they should go to study abroad, the answer is simple. Go to the place that makes you as uncomfortable as you can stand. Learning to be comfortable with your discomfort is a key aspect of learning. All creative people and self-regulated learners have learned to expand their own comfort with discomfort.

If I reject all ideas that are foreign, I will miss opportunities to change. But if I accept all new ideas as better, I will simply substitute one set of assumptions for another. Learning is about creating a space, at least temporarily, for what might be true. 

Learning is also about making distinctions. All the music we hate sounds the same. OR more accurately, the less we know about something, the more it seems to all be the same. As we learn, we distinguish, and things become more complex. Knowledge is also always changing: new discoveries will change what we thought we already knew. 

Our tolerance for ambiguity is useful because it mirrors how knowledge is assessed and accumulated. The answer to most good questions, is “it depends.”

Discovering your Accent with Study Abroad

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My series of public commentaries on WYPR continues here

Here at Goucher, we require all students to study abroad before they graduate. We do this in part because employers want graduates who can navigate working with people from different cultures and backgrounds, but also because study abroad provides an almost unique opportunity for self-discovery, reflection, and growth.

One of the first things we notice when we leave home is that everyone else in the world speaks with an accent. Then we realize that we too have an accent. Upon further reflection, we get the big reveal—that everyone has an accent. There is no neutral way of speaking, and everyone speaks in a way conditioned by culture, geography, and experience. 

This is equally true for how we all think—everyone also has a thought accent and study abroad brings us face to face with our assumptions and how they differ from those in our new surroundings. We can exchange one thought accent for another—just as we can learn a new spoken accent—but the insight that we all have assumptions that are invisible to us is fundamental to critical thinking. 

Initially, this can seem crippling, especially for students whose high school experience was all about a single truth or a single right answer. But understanding that different is often just different is a critical path to many things. Study abroad is not just about visiting difference, it is about encountering your own difference, your own assumptions and learning that everyone thinks with an accent. 

The future of work: what you do will not define who you should be.

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My series on WYPR continues here.

As parents, we want our children to be happy after college, just not in our basement. Given the cost, it is reasonable to expect one benefit of college to be a better job—and college graduates earn, on average, $1M more over a lifetime over those with no college education. 

But technology is creating new jobs and eliminating old ones. No college can give you all of the content that you will need in 10 years, because a lot of it has not yet been discovered. The future is unknown. But it will involve technology.

If you want to be prepared for the future job market, focus on the places where computers do less well. You will still need to be able to interface with computers and understand data analytics, but the future of work is about being complimentary to technology.

So an modern education should help you ask better questions. Computers will increasing be able to answer our questions faster, but thinking of new and more creative questions to ask is something humans are likely to be better at for a very long time. It is our ability to leap into the unknown that provides the advantage.

Technology is also changing the nature of work. Artificial intelligence might make your job obsolete, but might also make work obsolete. Here again, determining not only what CAN be done, but what SHOULD be done, and what is worth doing—these will remain fundamentally human decisions. Education should also provide the tools to create meaning in life. Helping students understand who they can be and not just what they do is an essential part of college.

It is HOW you go to college and not WHERE

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Next in my continuing series of public commentary on WYPR. You can listen here

As high school seniors and their parents enter the stressful college decision time, here is some advice. Relax.

Where you go to college matters a lot less than how you go to college. We have know this for years, but it is hard to accept. Surely being around all of those future titans of industry at Harvard has some advantage. Probably, but much of that seems to be correlation not causal: people who exercise also tend to eat better. 

What we do know is that college provides the most benefit when students are engaged in their own learning. Find a mentor. Do research. Spend the time to meet new people. Finding a person who believes in you and your potential matters far more than anything you will do in class. 

If you find a place where you seem to fit in and it feels right—that is probably the right place for you. But if you picked wrong, you will probably never know. Most students are pretty happy with where they have picked: in truth, any college feels way better than high school. 

What you do while you are in college—any college–really matters. Take advantage of the diversity of new people. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Go to exhibitions, events and talks you think you will hate.  Any one of them could change your life. So pick a school and then relax. But once you arrive make new friends and most importantly—go visit staff and faculty.

The Entire Toolbox

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Here is the second installment in my series on higher education for WYPR. You can also listen to it here.

Any college major is like a single tool. And most tools are really only useful when the job at hand is the one for which it has been designed.  Biology might be a hammer, and anthropology a screwdriver. But which tool will you need in ten years? If the jobs of the future are uncertain, then what you really need is a larger toolbox. 

Colleges usually require a series of introductory courses. It is important for students to be exposed to every tool in the toolbox, but do you really need an entire semester of Introduction to the Hammer before you are ready to build something? Might we instead let students pick problems that interest them? 

This is motivating, and we all learn more when we care about the topic. It is also more of a “real world” job skills approach. We don’t know what the problem will be after you graduate, but we suspect you will need both your hammer and your screwdriver. 

College students are often far too focused on trying to pick the right major. But rather than specializing in a specific tool, or picking your favorite way of looking at the world, wouldn’t it be better to figure out what types of problems really matter the most to you?  

If you are interested in poverty, the environment, immigration or disease, you will still need to understand something about politics, culture, history, music, science, marketing, anthropology, psychology and language. They all have important insights to offer and they are all tools that can help you build your solution.